Breaking Down the Freelance Economy

The American workforce is now 34% freelancer, according to a new study commissioned by the Freelancers Union and the recently-merged Elance-oDesk. Well, sort of: 14.3 million of the 53 million freelancers counted in the survey are “moonlighters” (people with full-time jobs doing independent work in their spare time). Another 5.5 million are temp workers. Here’s the full breakdown:

In any case, it’s a lot of people. But what’s hard to say is whether it’s more or less than there used to be. For the past few years, the main data source for those trying to quantify the freelance economy has been a 2006 Government Accountability Office report that put the number of “contingent workers” at 42.6 million, or 31% of the workforce. And yes, 53 million is more than 42.6 million and 34% is more than 31%, but the two surveys weren’t exactly counting the same people (moonlighters, for example, aren’t contingent workers). And back in 2006, the GAO estimated that “contingent workers constituted a relatively constant proportion of the total workforce from 1995 through 2005.”

This doesn’t really support the claims we’ve been hearing for almost two decades now that the U.S. is becoming a nation of free agents, freelancers, or supertemps. It doesn’t entirely contradict them either, though. Back in February, in an exhaustive (and maybe exhausting) look at the numbers on self-employment, I tried to square the grand claims with the pretty inconclusive data by arguing that long declines in old-style independent work in agriculture and small-scale retail and services were probably masking a rise in white-collar independent work. But while there’s some evidence to back this up, such as the Census Bureau’s annual tally of “nonemployer businesses,” which shows a 29% rise from 2002 to 2012, government data on the phenomenon is pretty spotty.

It would be even more helpful, and the data would be even more credible, if this stuff just became part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ regular employment surveys. But government statistics-gatherers are on the defensive these days in Washington, so they’re not going to be expanding their surveys any time soon. Which is too bad, because white-collar freelancers almost certainly are becoming a more important economic force, and it would be nice if more of the country’s economic policy-makers were aware of that.